A student of the École des Beaux-Arts, passionate about drawing and sculpture, she took her first steps in the cinema somewhat by chance.
“I didn't want to be an actress but an artist.
I was just an extra to bring some money home.
Then I was offered a real role.
It wasn't what I wanted.
I thought: I'll go and ask them for the moon, a million.
They gave it to me and I started making movies”
, she told
Vanity Fair
Italy in 2007. Luigina Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927 in the small village of Subiaco, in the heart of Abruzzo, in the mountains of central Italy, in a modest family which then moved to Rome.
For four years, from 1947 to 1951, she only obtained secondary roles, until
Fanfan la tulipe
by Christian-Jaque and its 6.7 million spectators consecrated her in 1952. This little brunette with voluptuous shapes and with a glowing gaze then followed
Les Belles de nuit
by René Clair in 1952 and
Pain, love and fantasy
by Luigi Comencini in 1953.
Read alsoGina Lollobrigida, the Italian queen of cinema, died at 95
His only regret?
To have
"never found a soul
mate"
and to have known only "one-sided
"
love , she declared to
Vanity Fair
in 2007. In 1969, Gina Lollobrigida had divorced Milko Skofic, the doctor
who
she had married in 1949 and from whom she had her only son, Milko Jr, who bore her a grandson.
In 2006, at the age of 79, Gina Lollobrigida hit the headlines when she announced her wedding to Spanish entrepreneur Javier Rigau Rafols, 34 years her junior.
But the couple split amid turmoil and legal battles a few months later.
Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida and her husband Milko Skofic holding hands with their son Andrea in 1960. ZUMA/ABACA
Failures
During a television program in November 2017, she also revealed, with modesty and dignity, to have suffered two sexual assaults in her youth.
"It stays in you and it marks your character
," she assured.
She was also involved in two trials.
In the first, the Court of Cassation imposed on him a guardian for the management of his assets.
In the second, still in progress, his ex-handyman is accused of abuse of weakness towards him.
A goodwill ambassador for Unicef, the actress also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the European Parliament in 1999 on the list of a left-wing party.
She will try in 2022, again in vain, to obtain a seat in the Italian Senate.
In France, she was made an officer of arts and letters in 1986 and a commander in 2004. But she had to wait until February 2018 to have her star in Hollywood.
Read alsoFanfan la Tulipe, Notre-Dame de Paris… The greatest films of Gina Lollobrigida
Gina Lollobrigida plays with the greatest actors: Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Marcello Mastroianni, Yul Brynner or even Humphrey Bogart in
Stronger than the Devil
in 1954 and Anthony Quinn in
Notre-Dame de Paris
by Jean Delannoy (1956), where she embodies Esmeralda.
She toured the United States until 1962, then ended up returning to Italy.
She then plays only occasionally for the cinema and for television, appearing in a few films of the 1990s such as
XXL
by Ariel Zeitoun with Gérard Depardieu and
Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma
by Agnès Varda.
A passion: sculpture
In a sign that her aura hasn't waned, a 2013 auction of her jewelry skyrocketed, with pearl drop earrings fetching $2.39 million, surpassing a previous record set by goldsmiths. similar jewelry from Elizabeth Taylor.
But, in the meantime, "La Lollo" had returned to her first artistic love, photography and then sculpture, to which she devoted herself entirely in the early 1980s.
“I have always preferred sculpture. I gave myself to the cinema and I don't regret it, but when the cinema changed, I decided to rediscover my passion"
, confided the star on the occasion of the inauguration in Paris of his first exhibition, which had also presented in Moscow and Venice.
She mainly sculpts characters, often women who look like her in her greatest roles.
